As video cameras have become increasingly cheaper to produce and purchase, their functionality is beginning to evolve beyond their original intent to merely capture sequences of images. Smart video cameras of the future will be able to provide intelligent data about what objects moved and what events occurred within their field of view. The new functionality of smart cameras provides many new applications.
One increasingly valuable application for smart cameras is surveillance. Typical prior art surveillance cameras record hundreds of hours of moving images onto video tape which must be monitored by people in order to tell if something suspicious occurred. Most of the video data is useless because nothing interesting is occurring. However, with smart cameras, people can be alerted to specific events which the smart cameras detect. As smart cameras are developed, software algorithms will need to be developed to implement the smart monitoring functions.
Video motion detection (VMD) detects motion within the view of the security camera to trigger data storage or alarms. VDM is not considered a real time event detection technology because it does not enable the user to specify exactly what event is of interest for real time notification. VDM may be considered a smart compression technology.